Coffees I won't forget
A little over ten years ago, we had a rather substantial coffee on the edge of Diana Park. For me at least, those coffees launched a project whose 10th anniversary we are celebrating this year. I sat at a table in the oak tree, sipping coffee and, as usual, telling my ideas about starting a new business in so many words. My coffee companion Peter Fagernäs is not the quietest of men either and together we came up with the idea of starting a consultancy specialising in influencing.
Even then, the idea was to bring together experts from different backgrounds to work as a team to tackle societal issues important to businesses. It was important from the outset to specialise in making a difference, to seek out the most business-critical assignments for our clients and to ensure that we delivered results.
Petter's years of experience in management thinking combined with my own lessons in influencing made Blic special from the start. My friend Lasse Männisto, who was a Member of Parliament at the time, and Pasi Torpa, founder of the management consultancy August, provided me with essential ideas and sparring for my initial career.
In ten years, Blic has evolved rapidly. The first years could be described as a kind of pioneering period, when we were productising our services, building our team and creating our internal procedures. Right from the start, I wanted Blic to be an office that emphasised the importance of the work community. Over the last few years in particular, I feel that it is the investment in community that has sustained our team as the world around us has gone from one upheaval to another.
The spirit of Blic is strong and the outlook for the future is promising. We have built a true team of professionals, combining long-standing expertise from diverse backgrounds with an extreme desire to learn new things and tackle increasingly demanding challenges. Today, we are working on projects at least at three different administrative levels: influencing EU decision-making in Brussels and influencing domestic decision-making at national, regional and local level.
When I go back to the coffee moment ten years ago, I can still recognise the ideas that Petter and the Blic team and I set out to build together on those PowerPoint slides. During our journey, many of our ideas have proven to be sustainable and have helped us to build on them to create new ideas for the future. That is why I say that our journey is just beginning.
Niilo Mustonen
The author is the founder and managing partner of Blic.